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Defrag needed after relocating? #1
Esteban Ulmi's picture
by Esteban Ulmi
November 6, 2012 - 7:31am

Hi

Bought your Aperture video and liked it a lot. As recomended, I changed my masterd library to referenced. From about 110 GB it went down to about 70 GB. Good so far. But my back-up with a 800 Firewire ext HD is very slow now. For copying 1 GB it takes minutes, that was much faster before.

Could it be, that my harddrive now is very fragmented and I should run a defrag program?
Thanks & greetings
Esteban

Esteban Ulmi's picture
by Esteban Ulmi
November 20, 2012 - 8:48am

Ok, I did all as you mentioned and all worked well. Thanks a lot

…and in case of future problems, I still have the option to sue you :)

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
November 20, 2012 - 11:50pm

Great! Thanks for the feedback. Glad you got it all sorted out and you got updated. Cheers

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
November 6, 2012 - 9:05am

Hi Esteban
Most people will tell you not to defragment. Too dangerous! One thing you can try is to copy the Lib to a newly formatted hard then erase the old then copy back the lib from the formatted drive. This is Safe but make sure you have other backups available. If you are a wild guy (like me) who thinks that you have three other back ups and you want to risk it all, you can try iDfrag from coriolis-systems.com, there is another company but the name illudes me.
I will deny in a court of law that I gave you any advice or indicated that I have even used idrag. Cheers

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
November 7, 2012 - 2:52am

David,

You find defragging that dangerous?

I’ve had iDefrag for years, and ran it ages ago, then just ran it again (and should have done it much sooner). My internal 1TB drive took three solid days to defrag, which was painful to watch, but it just finished yesterday and so far so good. Too soon to say if it’s truly any better, but time will tell. My system was very, very fragged.

I think you’re not supposed to defrag SSD drives though right… haven’t looked up why yet though.

@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
November 7, 2012 - 4:23am

I always add a little humor to my posts so you have to take me with a grain of salt. I have used idefrag for a couple of years but I do it at the last resort or when an update has caused tons of problems. Also every time I tell people I defray I gets lots of gasps and warning that its dangerous. I have never had a problem but somebody must of had to, to have caused such a stink against it. Joseph SSD and now possible Fusion Drives should not be defraged. Maybe Coriolis is working on that. I think there is a multiple burn to disk problem with SSDs. Someone smarter can enlighten me. So yes I do it but I have Backups and Backups.

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

gfsymon's picture
by gfsymon
November 7, 2012 - 4:53am

The MacOS defrags its startup drive constantly. You just need to leave it running overnight for a few days. So if your Aperture library is on there, then it should be getting defragged.

Joseph … 3 days?!?

If you have 2nd drive available, big enough to fit your 1Tb drive’s contents :

1/ Copy your 1Tb drive to 2nd drive.
3/ Reformat your fragged 1st drive.
4/ Copy back, from 2nd to 1st drive.

This is a *total* defrag.

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
November 7, 2012 - 5:00am

David, I’m all over your humor ;-)

Grant — yep, 3 days. A 1TB drive and I even had over 30% free, so it wasn’t for lack of space. Check out this [screenshot] before I started (look at the bar at the bottom for the full picture).

I will say though that so far I haven’t heard the grinding hard drive like I usually did if I tried to, oh I dunno, search for anything.

And yes a full copy probably would have been faster, but I didn’t know how long this’d take before I started. But also a full copy on the OS drive is complicated in itself, so this worked fine.

@PhotoJoseph
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Butch Miller's picture
by Butch Miller
November 7, 2012 - 5:03am

“The MacOS defrags its startup drive constantly. You just need to leave it running overnight for a few days. So if your Aperture library is on there, then it should be getting defragged.”

This has been my understanding as well … OS X has been taking care of this type of maintenance in the background (usually scheduled during idle time in the wee hours so as not to conflict with normal workflow) for quite some time. Where you can run into issues is with laptops that are powered off for lengthy periods of time … then the maintenance routines seldom run as scheduled … Even then, the Mac OS is pretty good at working with fragmented file structure as it pertains to disk directory matters …

My main iMac workstation is rarely off … and seldom if ever shows any significant fragmentation …

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
November 7, 2012 - 5:07am

Butch, Grant — where did you get that info on the OS degragging on it’s own? As you can see from my [screenshot] that was clearly NOT the case for me.

@PhotoJoseph
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David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
November 7, 2012 - 6:20am

Joseph! never did my hard drive look that Red. You must contact idefrag and be used in their advertising statements. Thats got to be worth $500.00 plus life time software! A few years back it would of been worth more in the advertising world, not today.

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
November 7, 2012 - 8:19am

hahaha hey it’s worth a shot, right? ;-)

-Joseph

@PhotoJoseph
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gfsymon's picture
by gfsymon
November 7, 2012 - 6:26pm

Joseph,

Apple are pretty brief on the subject these days … but you can find longer support articles if you search.

Defrag utilities are a bit like snake oil on the Mac, much the same as anti-virus (IMHO). I notice this morning, that Sophos’ anti-virus software is a bigger threat than the zero viruses in existence for the Mac. Zero, being … zero. There’s only a handful of pointless trojans, which require an admin password to progress. The one issue that’s ever existed for MacOSX and that could go ahead without an admin password, was a Java exploit. Apple have not included Java in their OS since 10.6 and simply ‘unchecking’ a single checkbox in Safari’s prefs blocked the exploit.

Maintaining Aperture’s library totally contiguous is good for speed though, which is why it’s not a bad idea to keep it on it’s own partition or own disk. It makes the process of making it perfectly contiguous as simple as copy/format/copy. This may also lead you to having a separate disk or partition for the OS which does waste a little space, but is a good way of keeping things neat and tidy. :) :)

Grant

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
November 8, 2012 - 2:08am

Thanks for that link. Clearly, Apple be wrong :)

Recommended or not, “needed” or not, all I can do is report on real-world experience. You saw what my disk looked like pre- the three-day defrag, and it’s running smoother and quicker than it was before, for sure. When I create a new Finder window and choose “All my files”, the files show up in chronological order almost immediately, whereas before, I avoided that option like the plague because it’d bring my system to a crawl for up to 20 seconds, hard drive crunching away like mad.

So yeah, defragging has been great for me!

-Joseph

@PhotoJoseph
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Esteban Ulmi's picture
by Esteban Ulmi
November 15, 2012 - 4:06am

Thanks a lot for all the inputs, I’m convinced and will do defrag, but I’m still on Mac OS X 10.6.8 and Aperture 3.2.4

What would you do first:
a) update to OS X Mountain Lion/Aperture 3.4.3 and then defrag
b) defrag and then update all the stuff?

Esteban

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
November 15, 2012 - 9:07am

First iDefrag or copy over to a clean hardrive and the back to the original Vol, (note if the lib is on its own volume you can idefrag that volume when empty for added safety before returning the lib).

Second once you think every thing is in working order and you have new backups then upgrade the system.

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

dinjy gilani's picture
by dinjy gilani
July 5, 2013 - 4:40pm

Defraging becomes necessary when you change the place of your system files and folders. otherwise your pc performance will become slow. and to perform this action easily and safely you must take help from tidy up mac tool which also Organize Macbook Files easily.

http://descargar.tidyupformac.net

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